Did you know that comedienne/puppeteer Shari Lewis was also a kick-ass dancer? I didn’t. Apparently, when Captain Kangaroo was looking the other way, Shari was busy dancing up a storm in secret. In 1964 she appeared on an unidentified TV variety show (I believe it’s ‘Broadway Tonight’ based on a
Smoking on airplanes was once okay. Hell, I participated in that challenging sport for quite a few years. But advertising smoking on planes is another thing entirely. Above is a late 1950s commercial for Winston cigarettes. Apparently this particular airline handed out mini-packs for you as gift favors–kind of like
Yesterday I posted a fascinating short doc about the daunting creation of an animated film in 1938. Having seen my recent interest in the subject, YouTube quickly coughed up the above video about the methods by which characters in early cartoons went from being rigid stick figures and achieved human-style
This short doc from 1938 shows us the unbelievably intricate, detailed and tedious process used in crafting an animated picture in the era before Hanna-Barbara ruined animation with their cheap, non-moving backrounds and unrealistic body motions. ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ is the subject at hand and I can’t
Here’s an interview with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy that I’ve never seen before–perhaps it was recently unearthed since the relatively small amount of interview stuff with them available has long been well known to all serious L&H fans. It’s part of either a newsreel or TV short program called
Here’s a nice little clip of Peter Bogdanovich discussing ‘The Third Man’, Carol Reed and Orson Welles. I was honored to be friends with Peter for twenty years and always loved his impressions of people. Here he ‘does’ Orson Welles talking about how great the role of Harry Lime was
Did you know that Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s perfect screenplay for ‘The Apartment’ was written on the fly while the film was being shot? Can this actually be true? According to Shirley MacLaine, in the above very interesting doc about the making of the film, Wilder started filming with
Here’s a wonderful fifteen minute reel of TV commercials from 1965. This is what the world looked and sounded like when I was one year old. It was a world of Ford Mustangs, cigarettes, new pocketbook sized cameras, cleaning products advertised by housewives talking to each other in kitchens and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAG2omxiR-ohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA-KIaNmcE8 The main thing I remember about the children’s toy Lite Brite was that it never worked. Not mine, not my friends, not anyone’s who I knew. The pegs didn’t light up, the back of the thing fell apart easily, the bulbs weren’t even included with the set–which led to
It’s been said that MGM was where comedy went to die. Certainly that was the case with the Marx Brothers, whose final three MGM films were all abject unfunny failures. ‘Our Gang’ also suffered an ignominious end, morphing into a group of do-gooder kids who were eager to put on